Every January most people endeavor to create their list of personal resolutions. As an entrepreneur, I do my business resolutions at the start of the year as well, also known as my annual business plan. The secret to my success is to not make these resolution lists mutually exclusive.
I take a blended approach to goal-setting. My personal and business resolutions, always audacious, have to be perfectly synchronized for me to achieve my ultimate goal which is to maximize success and happiness simultaneously.
Isn’t it grand to have them both?
I believe the secret to having a stellar year is identifying our truest intentions and streamlining our efforts and energies in order to achieve them. In a sense, we need to work together internally.
After setting my personal resolutions, here’s how I determine my business resolutions (which is really my marketing plan). Focusing on my work, I make two lists: what brings me more pleasure, called my Soul-Work, and what brings me more profits, called my Sell-Work.
Soul-Work is what we do primarily to make us happy. Sell-Work is what we do primarily to make us money. If we lean too heavily on one we’ll end up missing the mark on the other. When these lists are intertwined we can jump higher and run faster.
Let me be clear; the Soul-Work we do helps to make us even more money. The Sell-Work we do helps to make us even happier. Therein lies my secret to achieving both success and happiness: Identifying these two lists, so that we are “doing what we love and doing what makes us money, concurrently”.
To maximize overall annual performance and productivity, we must streamline our efforts and energies. This encourages me to stop doing the things that I really don’t love doing and also don’t make much money. It’s like creating an annual P&L statement of my life’s endeavors and there is one bottom-line: achieving success and happiness concurrently.
The beauty of entrepreneurship is doing what you love, what you’re best at, and what also achieves your financial needs and goals. So many entrepreneurs struggle at determining their true niche. Others end up exhausting themselves doing things they don’t particularly love but puts more money in the bank.
My Soul-Work vs. Sell-Work strategy can be your solution, too. When you create these dual lists in all honesty, I am confident your business plan will look very different. There will be renewed balance. There will be renewed enthusiasm. There will be higher levels of success and happiness in the years to come!
Stuart Cohen, Chief Motivation Officer at StuartLloydCohen.com
If you can think big, Stuart will help you do big! An accomplished 28-year travel industry executive turned serial solopreneur, Stuart is a creator of brands and an energizing motivational speaker. He motivates & maximizes personal performance in leadership, entrepreneurship, salesmanship & wellness.
